May 31, 2004
Anti-Plagiarism Legislation as an (Almost) Adequate Replacement for Intellectual Property Law
I spend a lot of time here railing against the RIAA, et al., and it may sound as though I am opposed to intellectual property law altogether. This is pretty much the case. How, you may ask, can someone who is such a big fan of books, and plays, and science, and movies, and music think this way? The truth is that intellectual property law does help encourage production in these fields. I believe that people who create really outstanding works in these fields have a drive to create, and would do so even if they received no compensation whatsoever,...
Continue reading "Anti-Plagiarism Legislation as an (Almost) Adequate Replacement for Intellectual Property Law"
May 28, 2004
The Record Labels' Problem: They Are Obsolete
So USA Today is running an article about bands who support filesharing, and the reasons why bands support it and record lables don't. What it comes down to is this: filesharing (allegedly) hurts record labels, but it helps artists (financially). Why? Because the Internet is doing one of the millions of things it's advocates promised it would do back when we first started to get it in our homes: eliminating the middle-man. By distributing their music online, artists can generate audiences for their concerts (which is what they need to get money) without record labels. Furthermore, once they have generated...
Continue reading "The Record Labels' Problem: They Are Obsolete"
May 17, 2004
Outages and Such
So here's the thing: You may have noticed that there have been a lot of outages on this site lately. This has to do with being behind a firewall and on Verizon DSL. My current setup for this site has a lot of problems. This port forwarding thing is ugly (that's the silly numbers after the : in the URL), and it turns out that my DNS record is technically invalid (but it works anyway). What I really need is to actually pay for hosting. The cheapest hosting that will do what I need costs around $8/month, which will bring the cost of running this site, including the domain name, up to just over $100/year...
Continue reading "Outages and Such"
May 12, 2004
Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Foundations for an Absolutist Theory of Beauty
My
writings page has just been reorganized. There are now separate pages for
older and
newer documents. The first thing to go up on the new documents page is the paper "Beauty is
Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Foundations for an Absolutist Theory of Beauty." This is an edited and slightly expanded version of my term paper for aesthetics class this past semester (spring of 2004). Special thanks to Serena Halley whose comments made the first revision possible, and Michael Rohlf whose comments did the same for the second.
Click here to take a look at it (PDF format).
Continue reading "Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Foundations for an Absolutist Theory of Beauty"
May 10, 2004
Back Online After Outage
This site is now back online after an outage which lasted approximately two days. The outage was due to the move from on-campus housing to the Crusade house off campus, and then the realization, only after I had flown to the other side of the country, that Verizon was blocking port 80 and so the site was not viewable from outside the house. You may notice a change: the URLs you used before now forward to URLs with ugly port numbers at the end of the domain. Something else you might notice is that the URL http://kennypearce.net (without the www)...
Continue reading "Back Online After Outage"